If your community is a year old and feels small, the useful question is not "am I behind" but "behind what". Here is the age distribution of the platform you are actually on.
How old are Skool communities?
Roughly three quarters of every mapped Skool community was created in 2025 or 2026. Only about 4% predate 2024.
That is a very young platform, and it changes what "established" means. A community you joined that feels like an institution is, statistically, about eighteen months old. The people running it were where you are, recently.
Does age predict size?
Yes, and the gradient is steep:
The oldest cohort runs a median of 444 members against 41 for communities created this year — more than ten times, across a gap of roughly two to three years.
Read that as reassurance rather than as a verdict. A community founded this year sitting at 40-odd members is not underperforming; it is sitting exactly where the median community of its age sits. The 2025 cohort's median of 101 is what the same room looks like a year later.
It also sets a realistic pace. The distance from the 2026 median to the 2025 median is roughly sixty members in a year. Anything promising faster than that as a norm is describing outliers.
The limit that matters most here: dead communities are invisible from outside. A community created in 2024 that emptied out and went silent does not appear in this data at all. So these cohorts describe what survived to be measured, not what was launched — and the older cohorts are the most heavily filtered, because they have had the longest to fail. Some of the "older communities are bigger" effect is simply that small old communities stopped existing.
Why is the platform so young?
Partly because Skool itself is, and partly because of who arrives. Creation is running far ahead of the installed base: about 29% of everything currently visible was created inside the current year.
Two consequences worth holding onto.
Most of the advice about running a Skool community was written by people about eighteen months into it. That is not a criticism — it is the median experience level on the platform. But it means the confident playbooks circulating about what works at scale are usually extrapolations from a small and recent sample.
The benchmarks you compare yourself against are drawn from a young population too. Every figure in this library describes a platform where most communities are under two years old. That is the correct comparison for you if you are also young. It is a poor comparison for a mature community, and there is no large mature cohort to build one from yet.
Does an older community behave differently?
In the one way that gets measured most often, remarkably little. Whether a community charges is essentially flat across age cohorts — 36.8%, 29.5% and 33.2% across the three cuts. Older communities are bigger but not systematically more commercial.
And contribution concentration does not loosen with age either. A median 2.15% of members write three quarters of all posts, and that share holds across a 62-fold range of community sizes — which, given how tightly size tracks age here, means it holds across the age range too. An older, larger community has more people in its engine, not a proportionally bigger one. Who actually writes the posts works through why that ratio is so stable.
What does change with age is what a community can survive. A room with 444 members can lose a contributor without the feed going quiet. A room with 41 cannot — its engine is about one person. That fragility is the real difference between the cohorts, and it argues for knowing who your contributors are long before you are large enough for it to stop mattering.
What should you take from this?
Compare yourself to your cohort, not to the platform. A 2026 community should be looking at 41 members as the middle, not at the community with 9,000 that inspired it.
Expect a slow first year. The median community founded this year has 41 members. The median founded last year has 101. That is the shape of normal.
Do not read the older cohorts as a promise. They are the survivors of their year, and you cannot see the ones that did not make it. The gap between a 2024 cohort median and your own number is partly growth and partly selection, and nobody outside Skool can tell you the split.
These figures come from The State of Skool 2026, an independent measurement of 18,412 Skool communities. See the full report for the full structural analysis and 21 other findings.